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Company spotlight: Crafty Clicks

Crafty Clicks is a 100% B2B company that provides an address lookup and capture solution that’s most commonly seen on the checkout page of online shops. The process of entering a full address is accomplished with 80% fewer keystrokes on average, making the user experience quick and convenient. Retailers are continuously collecting addresses but human error leads to mistakes and incorrect addresses significantly impact first time delivery rates and customer satisfaction.

In the UK, we’re spoiled because by accident, the Royal Mail devised a system that is superbly suited to rapid address capture. You punch in your postcode and you’re immediately within 10-20 properties of where you want to be. Elsewhere though, the picture changes. The US zip code only narrows it down to a big chunk of the city, so the only interface that makes sense there is one where you type in other parts of the address – a name, house number, that sort of thing. That’s why since last year, we have offered two products – a UK-only lookup and our new international product with a predictive tool.

The process of entering a full address is accomplished with 80% fewer keystrokes on average
Adam Stylo, Director, Crafty Clicks

Each provides a clear ROI which can be measured on the data quality side. Without address validation tools, errors in address data cause issues further down the line, for example, a proportion of deliveries going wrong. With our tools in place, error rates reduce and the benefits can be easily measured. The customer usability benefits of address input are less easy to measure but can be equally important. Making the checkout simpler to use helps conversion rates and projects a customer-friendly image.

What is your USP?

Unbeatable value by combining reliability, data quality, service and price. Since our launch in 2008, we’ve had 100% uptime. Our tech support is UK based and we don’t employ a huge sales force, which both cut overheads.

Most of our pricing is transactional and the costs vary but it goes from about 3.5p per data capture down to well below a penny once you’re on an annual contract. Considering some clients report a 50% reduction in addressing errors, savings in postage and in the time taken to sort out incorrect deliveries are obvious. It’s a testament to our value that we have nearly zero customer churn. When we lose customers, its nearly always at the bottom end from startup companies that have folded. We never get any reasonably sized customer moving to a competitor.

How would you describe your company’s vision?

We think all retailers should have access to address lookup. Accuracy in recording addresses is hugely important in customer transactions and since the data already exists out there somewhere, you only need the right tool to to tap into that data and utilise it. Which, of course, we provide.

What new functionality does your latest version give to retailers?

Our most recent release is our predictive address auto-complete tool which covers all countries in the world, not just the UK. Originally we were just a UK postcode lookup provider but we have had numerous requests from clients who wanted to see the same benefits for their international addresses and deliveries.

Our original UK postcode lookup remains the most popular product as it offers such a clear user experience that its simplicity is hard to beat. The predictive auto-complete product is more akin to a Google search and as I’ve already said, its value is that it presents a unified international user experience, even in countries where address systems are not as well defined as in the UK.

How does this compare to what your competitors are doing?

The market for address capture tools is growing fast but is still fairly small outside the UK. Everyone is aiming for similar goals: fastest possible data entry combined with highest possible address accuracy. We go to great lengths to make sure the data we source is the best available. We then apply the latest search technologies to index it and make it available via a robust API.

Where we differ from some of our competitors is we remain focused on address validation and doing that to the best level possible. We deliver superb data quality and performance, all at a great price. We are committed to providing a fantastic, streamlined product that delivers, and not to be tempted to add extra features which only appear to add value.

Who are your customers?

We serve a huge range of businesses. Our hosted SAAS model is flexible and scalable and no client is too small or too big to benefit from our service. The majority of our customers are online retailers who use us on their checkout and registration pages. We also serve a number of call centres, such as banks, insurance and financial advisers.

What do you see as challenges in the coming year and what are you doing to meet those challenges?

Our huge challenge now is how we actually reach the rest of the world. The UK is a lovely market to be in because the product sells itself and we’ve grown about 40-45% per year over the last five years. Internationally, though, it’s a completely different picture because this set of tools are not well known, so we need to explain the benefits more. Since that’s a completely different sales cycle and we don’t want to become a sales-led organisation, we’re having to think about this differently. So can we leverage social media, or go through developers and system integrators? How can we be smart without having to push our pricing up? We already provide a great service at a great price point so the challenge is to not shift that balance by involving sales force commissions.

And our in-built reliability gives us a huge advantage now that we’re dealing with these huge international data sets. Having to be smart about how we continue to manage that data means that we’re really leading the way at the moment, I think.

Customer case study – Logic Supply

A leading industrial PC company, Logic Supply designs highly-configurable computers that are engineered for reliability. The company is fuelled by an innovative direct-to-customer business model that combines vertical integration, modular product design and a powerful online platform. Logic Supply offers computers that are “designed to last, built to order, and delivered in days.” Founded in 2003, it serves customers around the world, including in the US, EU and Taipei, who build hardware for everything from spacecraft and deep sea exploration equipment to modern manufacturing facilities and innovative energy management solutions.

The Logic Supply ecommerce platform offers regionally localised online shopping in four different languages. Orders are also taken offline by a dedicated sales team. “With growing order volumes, shipping delays due to inaccurate address data were starting to become a real business issue,” remembers Allison Miller, whose task it was to address this growing problem.

Logic Supply installed the ClickToAddress extension on their Magento platform to provide address lookup, both on the checkout and in the back office order screens, and ran a three week trial across August and September 2016. During the trial period, the number of shipping issues due to bad address data was reduced by more than 50% compared to the previous control period.

“The trial exceeded our expectations and we are very happy to continue with the ClickToAddress system”.

Logic Supply are currently training more of their sales staff to use the new system and looking into normalising all existing customer records, which should translate into further improvements to shipping delivery rates.

CRAFTY CLICKS IN BRIEF

Company founded: May 2008Product: Postal address capture and validationGlobal Reach: We have customers in both the UK and globally. Our clients are delivering goods to customers internationally with ease, accuracy and confidence thanks to our address search toolCustomers: B&Q, RBS, NatWest, Ryman, Moonpig, PrettyLittleThing